The God Delusion

[The Reality Salesman01]

I enjoyed "Letter to a Christian Nation" I like how Sam Harris singles out the "Moderate Christian" and puts the screws to them using The Bible.

One if my issues with Harris is that he tends to go for the low-hanging fruit- and the stereotypical Christian in this book doesn't resemble most of the Christians I know at all (although it does seem to resemble some of the ones here). It seemed like taking easy potshots just to piss people off, which is fine, but it isn't adding anything to any useful dialogue.

I'm not sure which Christians you are talking about, but if you mean the ones that don't think about it much, and just consider God a nice idea that makes them happy, then I would say that Harris made more effort to address them specifically. Those are the "Moderates".

This is the first page of the book, I think he makes his point quite clear when he narrows his sights on the thing that needs to be discussed.

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Of course, there are Christians who do not agree with either of us. There are Christians who consider other faiths to be equally valid paths to salvation. There are Christians who have no fear of hell and who do not believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus. These Christians often describe themselves as "religious liberals" or "religious moderates." From their point of view, you and I have both misunderstood what it means to be a person of faith. There is, we are assured, a vast and beautiful terrain between atheism and religious fundamentalism that generations of thoughtful Christians have quietly explored. According to liberals and moderates, faith is about mystery, and meaning, and community, and love. People make religion out of the full fabric of their lives, not out of mere beliefs.
I have written elsewhere about the problems I see with religious liberalism and religious moderation. Here, we need only observe that the issue is both simpler and more urgent than liberals and moderates generally admit. Either the Bible is just an ordinary book, written by mortals, or it isn't. Either Christ was divine, or he was not. If the Bible is an ordinary book, and Christ an ordinary man, the basic doctrine of Christianity is false. If the Bible is an ordinary book, and Christ an ordinary man, the history of Christian theology is the story of bookish men parsing a collective delusion. If the basic tenets of Christianity are true, then there are some very grim surprises in store for nonbelievers like myself. You understand this. At least half of the American population understands this. So let us be honest with ourselves: in the fullness of time, one side is really going to win this argument, and the other side is really going to lose.

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What I think he was trying to do was get those people to realize what lot they were throwing in with when they claimed to be Christian by pointing to blatant absurdities that most people would see as something they would not at all like to be associated with. He was writing about fundies out of hopes that the moderates, that don't think about what the Christian title is actually affiliated with, will realize how absurd it is, and that by ignoring it, the moderates are helping the fundies perpetuate the religion their crazy book has created!

He used examples of how religion has very real effects on our government and well-being, and drew attention to the fact that religion is not at all as harmless as people like to pretend it is.

I'm not sure what cheap pot-shots you're talking about, but I'm sure its possible I didn't recognize them. To me, all objections raised to religion seem like cheap pot-shots.

Something Harris did in his book, which I think is particularly useful in raising doubt, is pointing out the parts of religious books that make their respective gods incompatible. Drawing attention to the millions of people that claim exclusive relationships with incompatible Gods should make somebody a bit skeptical about the one they think they have.

Either one faith is right, and everyone else in the world is lying and/or delusional, or they're all mistaken. The first one is quite a hefty claim.

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with Harris I can read three pages and not be able to summarize them because I'm just scanning words after a while, nothing makes it to my long-term memory with him. You know, scratch that: nothing makes it to my short term memory with him.

That's how I used to be with everything I read (ADHD)! But thanks to Adderall, I can even read The Bible!